Sunday, September 04, 2005

Katrina Aftermath - The State of Insanity...

Reading the news today and watching the live feeds from Baton Rouge is really depressing.

FEMA officials made an appearance at Bay-St. Lewis, Mississippi today. They were seen at the demolished bridge in town (what used to be town), not inspecting the damage but apparently having a kind of "class photo" of themselves next to the devastation...and then they left. They lined up for a group photo next to this ruined and unusable bridge just to take their picture and then left. At 'a boy...good job...

St. Bernard Parrish has an Environmental disaster underway with very little to no help. Some kind of oil facility has split in half and oil is leaking in masssive amounts. They are searching for the dead while looking for survivors that did not have the financial means to leave before Katrina hit...65 confirmed dead so far just there with 300 body bags ordered. Thank you Canada for the rescue crews that have come down to help there.

In New Orleans, there was some bad news, 7 people have been shot (5 of which have died) for either brandishing arms or shooting at contractors that were trying to work on the levee. With all that New Orleans has gone through, I do not think anyone can feel better about more deaths.

There have been private buses turn up under the pretense of evacuating survivors only to try and charge these victims $100.00 a head after getting on the bus...that did not go over well with locals and ended quickly.

There is good news from New Orleans being that more survivors have been found and evacuated from rooftops, etc. and there have been no deaths today at the M*A*S*H type unit at the airport but there have been three live births of healthy babies!

Bush Administration Blames Local Government

Bush and his administration is starting to place the blame for the slow response on the Mayor of New Orleans, local law enforcement and the Govenor of Louisiana. I would like to point out serious flaws in this blame game. The Bush administration made severe cuts in every state's budget and slashed between 70-80% of Louisiana's budget for the programs they had for hurricane preparedness and Emergency Management. The Feds are also heaping blame on the Govenor for not ASKING the Federal govt. for aid. WTF??? Any person with any grasp of their mental facilities had no problem seeing that help was needed...DESPERATELY. With funding severely cut by the Bush administration, any amount of common sense on the part of the Bush administration would allow them to realize that the city no longer had the ability to combat such a crisis. Blaming those who had to deal with the immediate aftermath does not get Chertoff off the hook for clearly having no idea of what he is doing, Brown off the hook for his incompetence or Bush off the hook for his delay in getting involved.

Bush has asked the Govenor to give the Federal government full control of the rescue and aid efforts which the Governor wisely refused. She then hired Clinton's FEMA Chief to advise her and to work for the State of Louisiana. I would bet that if the Federal government took over, the press would be giving us the same horse puckey that we get from Iraq...we would ONLY be told what they want us to know and we would be deliberately denied the whole truth because it would embarrass them.

It is also an outrage that when Bush flew over New Orleans, all aid was halted. It pissed people off when Bush caused delays when he showed up at a Nascar event last year but this time it could have meant life or death. Somebody needs to give George an extensive psychiatric evaluation...people were dropping dead from lack of food, water and medication and all aid is HALTED because he FINALLY decides to get involved and do his job?

It is contradictory in the highest sense that the Bush PR is going into overdrive and calls for medical help are going out, yet American doctors who have showed up to help are being turned away...>article.

Homeland Security won't let Red Cross deliver food now that the Feds came in. You can find the article here. What purpose does it serve to stop more aid from getting to those who need it? Chertoff as head of Homeland Security has proven his incompetence and disregard for the victims in New Orleans.

Tim Russert called Chertoff to the carpet on Meet The Press...about time someone did. You can find the transcript here.

The evacuees are being bused and flown out of Loisiana without being given any idea of where they are being taken. How are these people supposed to connect with surviving family members if nobody is told where they are being taken? This is an atrocious way to treat these people.

We finally are seeing how Michael Brown came to have his job at FEMA and what he did before he came to FEMA. Life before FEMA found Brown working for the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA)...his biggest responsibility was to qualify judges for horse shows. He was asked to resign after 11 years because of a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervisory failures. Supervisory failures? Is that not what we are seeing now? That sure is great qualification for FEMA, is it not? He came to FEMA in 2001 at the suggestion of a buddy (Joseph Allbaugh, who was a colledge roommate) and was appointed the Chief of FEMA when his buddy (Allbaugh) quit in 2003. It has been said by Bush that Brown has handled more than 164 emergency situations as of 2004. Let me ask you...does that include the emergency hurricane relief funds given to a Florida County (unnamed on purpose) That did not suffer hurricane damage? Did it include those hard hit Florida Counties that got shafted and did not get as much aid as they needed? You get the idea...

Yeah buddy...Brown is da man!

It has been revealed that there was a plan for a hurricane in New Orleans...Brown chose to ignore it.

A coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups announced a campaign today to urge that the U.S. Congress launch a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The campaign focuses on evidence that recently emerged in a British memo containing minutes of a secret July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.